Posts

Hierarchical softmax is an alternative to the softmax in which the probability of any one outcome depends on a number of model parameters that is only logarithmic in the total number of outcomes. In “vanilla” softmax, on the other hand, the number of such parameters is linear in the number of total number of outcomes. In a case where there are many outcomes (e.g. in language modelling) this can be a huge difference. The consequence is that models using hierarchical softmax are significantly faster to train with stochastic gradient descent, since only the parameters upon which the current training example depend need to be updated, and less updates means we can move on to the next training example sooner. At evaluation time, hierarchical softmax models allow faster calculation of individual outcomes, again because they depend on less parameters (and because the calculation using the parameters is just as straightforward as in the softmax case). So hierarchical softmax is very interesting from a computational point-of-view. By explaining it here, I hope to convince you that it is also interesting conceptually. To keep things concrete, I’ll illustrate using the CBOW learning task from word2vec (and fasttext, and others).

The CBOW learning task

The CBOW learning task is to predict a word by the words on either side of it (its “context” ).
We are interested then in the conditional distribution , where ranges over some fixed vocabulary .
This is very similar to language modelling, where the task is to predict the next word by the words that precede it.

CBOW with softmax

One approach is to model the conditional distribution with the softmax. In this setup, we have:

where is a normalisation constant, is the hidden layer representation of the context , and is the second-layer word vector for the word . Pictorially:

The parameters of this model are the entries of the matrices and .

Cross-entropy

For a single training example , the model parameters are updated to reduce the cross-entropy between the distribution produced by the model and the distribution representing the ground truth:
Because is one-hot at (in this case, the word “time”), the cross-entropy reduces to a single log probability:

Note that this expression doesn’t depend on whether is modelled using the softmax or not.

Optimisation of softmax

The above expression for the cross entropy is very simple. However, in the case of the softmax, it depends on a huge number of model parameters. It does not depend on many entries of the matrix (only on those that correspond to the few words in the context ), but via the normalisation it depends on every entry of the matrix . The number of these parameters is proportional to , the number of vocabulary words, which can be huge. If we optimise using the softmax, all of these parameters need to be updated at every step.

Hierarchical softmax

Hierarchical softmax provides an alternative model for the conditional distributions such that the number of parameters upon which a single outcome depends is only proportional to the logarithm of . To see how it works, let’s keep working with our example. We begin by choosing a binary tree whose leaf nodes can be made to correspond to the words in the vocabulary:
Now view this tree as a decision process, or a random walk, that begins at the root of the tree and descents towards the leaf nodes at each step. It turns out that the probability of each outcome in the original distribution uniquely determines the transition probabilities of this random walk. At every internal node of the tree, the transition probabilities to the children are given by the proportions of total probability mass in the subtree of its left- vs its right- child:
This decision tree now allows us to view each outcome (i.e. word in the vocabulary) as the result of a sequence of binary decisions. For example:

where is the probability of choosing the right child when transitioning from node . There are only two outcomes, of course, so:

These distributions are then modelled using the logistic sigmoid :

where for each internal node of the tree, is a coefficient vector – these are new model parameters that replace the of the softmax. The wonderful thing about this new parameterisation is that the probability of a single outcome only depends upon the of the internal nodes that lie on the path from the root to the leaf labelling . Thus, in the case of a balanced tree, the number of parameters is only logarithmic in the size of the vocabulary!

Which tree?

J. Goodman (2001)

Goodman (2001) uses 2- and 3-level trees to speed up the training of a conditional maximum entropy model which seems to resemble a softmax model without a hidden layer (I don’t understand the optimisation method, however, which is called generalised iterative scaling). In any case, the internal nodes of the tree represent “word classes” which are derived in a data driven way (which is apparently elaborated in the reference [9] of the same author, which is behind a paywall).

F. Morin & Y. Bengio (2005)

Morin and Bengio (2005) build a tree by beginning with the “is-a” relationships for WordNet. They make it a graph of words (instead of word-senses), by employing a heuristicFelix, and make it acyclic by hand). Finally, to make the tree binary, the authors repeatedly cluster the child nodes using columns of a tf-idf matrix.

A. Mnih & G. Hinton (2009)

Mnih & Hinto (2009) use a boot-strapping method to construct binary trees. Firstly they train their language model using a random tree, and afterwards calculate the average context vector for every word in the vocabulary. They then recursively partition these context vectors, each time fitting a Gaussian mixture model with 2 spherical components. After fitting the GMM, the words are associated to the components, and this defines to which subtree (left or right) a word belongs. This is done in a few different ways. The simplest is to associate the word to the component that gives the word vector the highest probability (“ADAPTIVE”); another is splitting the words between the two components, so that the resulting tree is balanced (“BALANCED”). They consider also a version of “adaptive” in which words that were in a middle band between the two components are placed in both subtrees (“ADAPTIVE(e)”), which results not in a tree, but a directed acyclic graph. All these alternatives they compare to trees with random associations between leaves and words, measuring the performance of the resulting language models using the perplexity. As might be expected, their semantically constructed trees outperform the random tree. Remarkably, some of the DAG models perform better than the softmax!

Mikolov et al. (2013)

The approaches above all use trees that are semantically informed. Mikolov et al, in their 2013 word2vec papers, choose to use a Huffman tree. This minimises the expected path length from root to leaf, thereby minimising the expected number of parameter updates per training task. Here is an example of the Huffman tree constructed from a word frequency distribution:
What is interesting about this approach is that the tree is random from a semantic point of view.

In their book “Perceptrons” (1969), Minsky and Papert demonstrate that a simplified version of Rosenblatt’s perceptron can not perform certain natural binary classification tasks, unless it uses an unmanageably large number of input predicates. It is easy to show that with sufficiently many input predicates, a perceptron (even on this type) can perform any classification with perfect accuracy (see page 3 of the notes below). The contribution of Minsky and Papert is to show that meaningful restrictions on the type of input predicates hamper the expressive ability of the perceptron to such a degree that it is unable to e.g. distinguish connected from disconnected figures, or classify according to whether the number of active pixels is odd or even. The former has a simple picture proof, whereas the crucial ingredient for the latter is the action of a permutation group on the retina (i.e. the input array) of the perceptron.

Talk

Style

The book is an engaging and instructive read – not only is it peppered with the author’s opinions and ideas, but it includes also enlightening comments on how the presented ideas originated, and why other ideas that occurred to the authors didn’t work out. The book still bears the marks of it’s making, so to speak.

Controversy

The publication of the first edition in 1969 is popularly credited with bringing research on perceptrons and connectionism in general to a grinding halt. The book is held to be unjust, moreover. The “perceptrons”, which Minsky and Papert prove to be so limited in expressive power, were in fact only a very simplified version of what practitioners then regarded as a perceptron. A typical perceptron (unlike those of Minsky and Papert) might include more layers, feedback loops, or even be coupled with another perceptron. All these variations are described in Rosenblatt’s book “Principles of Neurodynamics” (1962). This is put very well (and colourfully!) by Block in his review of the book (1970):

Thus, although the authors state (p. 4, lines 12-14) “we have agreed to use the name ‘perceptron’ in recognition of the pioneer work of Frank Rosenblatt.”, they study a severely limited class of machines from a viewpoint quite alien to Rosenblatt’s. As a result, the title of the book, although generous in intent, is seriously misleading to the naive reader who wants to find out something about the general class of Perceptrons.

In summary then, Minsky and Papert use the word perceptron to denote a restricted subset of the general class of Perceptrons. They show that these simple machines are limited in their capabilities. This approach is reminiscent of the möhel who throws the baby into the furnace, hands the father the foreskin and says, “Here it is; but it will never amount to much.”

Despite these serious criticisms, it should be noted that Block (himself a trained mathematician) was full of praise for the “mathematical virtuosity” exhibited by Minsky and Papert in their book.

As to whether the book alone stopped research into perceptrons is hard to judge, particularly given it’s impact is confounded by the tragic death of Rosenblatt (at age 41) only two years later.

Suppose you have a model that depends on real-valued parameters, and that you would like to constrain these parameters to be non-negative. For simplicity, suppose the model has a single parameter . Let denote the error function. To constrain to be non-negative, parameterise as the square of a real-valued parameter :

We can now minimise by choosing without constraints, e.g. by using gradient descent. Let be the learning rate. We have

by the chain rule. Thus

Thus we’ve obtained a multiplicative update rule for that is in terms of , only. In particular, we don’t need anymore!

Here we derive updates rules for the approximation of a row stochastic matrix by the product of two lower-rank row stochastic matrices using gradient descent. Such a factorisation corresponds to a decomposition

Both the sum of squares and row-wise cross-entropy functions are considered.

I learnt of the 1944 experiment of Heider and Simmel in the Machine Intelligence workshop at NIPS 2016. The experiment involved showing subjects the video below, and asking them to describe what they saw. If you’ve watched the video, you’ll not be surprised to learn that most of the subjects anthropomorphised the geometric objects (i.e. they described them as humans, or their actions and intentions in human terms). In the talk at the workshop, this was offered as evidence that humans have a tendency to anthropomorphise, the implication then being that it is not hard to trick users into believing that e.g. a chat bot is a real person. While the implication might indeed be true, I don’t think the experiment of Heider and Simmel shows this at all. In my view, the reason that viewers anthropomorphise the shapes in the video is because they know that the video is made by human beings, and as such is created with intention. When you watch this video, you are participating in an act of communication, and the natural question to ask is: “what are the creators trying to communicate to me?”. For contrast, imagine that you are sitting in the bath and you have a few triangular shapes that float. If you float the shapes on the water and watch them for a while as they randomly (without expression of intent!) bob about, are you likely to anthropomorphise them? I’d say you are much less likely to do so.

The UCI hosts a dataset of wine measurements that is fantastic for demonstrating the importance of feature scaling in unsupervised learning . There are a bunch of real-valued measurements (of e.g. chemical composition) for three varieties of wine: Barolo, Grignolino and Barbera. I am using this dataset to introduce feature scaling my course on DataCamp.

The wine measurements have very different scales, and performing a k-means clustering (with 3 clusters) on the unscaled measurements yields clusters that don’t correspond to the varieties:

However, if the measurements are first standardised, the clusters correspond almost perfectly to the three wine varieties:

varieties Barbera Barolo Grignolino
labels
0 0 59 3
1 48 0 3
2 0 0 65

Of course, k-means clustering is not meant to be a classifier! But when the clusters do correspond so well to the classes, then it is apparent that the scaling is pretty good.

Which wine varieties?

I had to search to find the names of the wine varieties. According to page 9 of “Chemometrics with R” (Ron Wehrens), the three varieties are: Barolo (58 samples), Grignolino (71 samples) and Barbera (48 samples). I was unable to follow Wehren’s citation (it’s his [6]) on Google books.

I’m teaching hierarchical clustering in my course on DataCamp, and I needed an interesting dataset. Importantly, I wanted the dataset to have labelled instances, so that the dendrogram would be easily interpretable, but also not too many instances, so they all fit on the dendrogram. Fortunately for me, the Eurovision song contest has been publishing the voting results (which is great!) and these are perfect. Both the voting results from the judges, and those from the public give great results. The only thing you need to adjust for is that countries are not allowed to vote for themselves in Eurovision, and this gives you some missing values in the data. I filled these with the maximum score of 12, since it is reasonable to assume that countries would vote selfishly if they were allowed to. Below is the dendrogram of a hierarchical (agglomerative) clustering using complete linkage.

A better version

It occurs to me now that I should have normalised the rows after filling in the missing values. This does indeed improve the hierarchical clustering further.

Non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) learns to reconstruct samples as a superposition of their constituent parts. In the paper of Lee and Seung (1999) that popularised NMF, this is called a “parts-based” representation. This is illustrated in that paper by applying NMF to encodings of images of faces, where NMF seems to decompose the faces into a collage of eigen-eyebrows and eigen-noses. Visual demonstrations are fantastic for conveying ideas, but in this particular instance, the clarity is compromised by the inherent noisiness of real-world facial images. The images are drawn, moreover, from the CBCL dataset, which has a non-commercial license. In order to get around this problem, and to have an even clearer visual demonstration of the “parts-based” decomposition provided by NMF for my course at DataCamp, I created a synthetic image dataset, where each image is of a single digit of a LCD display, as on a clock radio. The parts learned by NMF are then the individual “cells” of the LCD display.

You can construct this dataset yourself, using the code below. The collection of images is encoded as a 2d array of non-negative values. Each row corresponds to an image, and each column corresponds to a pixel. The non-negative entries represent the whiteness of the pixel, encoded here as a value between 0 and 1.

Alternatives

The standard bars provide a similar (but more apparently synthetic) image dataset for learning the parts of images. See, for example, the references given in Spratling (1996).

Another great visual dataset could be built from black-and-white images of the 52 playing cards in a deck. NMF would then learn the ranks (i.e. ace, 2, 3, …, ) and the suits (i.e. spades, hearts, …) as parts, and reconstruct playing cards from these. I haven’t done this.

Yet another great example dataset could be constructed using images of a piano keyboard, or perhaps just an octave range, colouring the keys according to how often they are pressed during a song. NMF should then be able to learn the chords as parts. The midi files to construct this dataset could be obtained from the Mutopia project, for example. I haven’t done this either.

Having trained a model, it is natural to want to understand how it works. An intuitively appealing approach is to consider data samples that maximise the activation of a hidden unit, and to take the common input features of these samples as an indication of what that unit has learned to recognise. However, as we’ll see below, it is a misconception to speak of hidden units if:

there is no non-linearity on the hidden layer;

the weights connecting the layers are unconstrained; and

the model is trained using (stochastic) gradient descent or similar.

In such a scenario, the hidden feature space must instead be considered as a whole.

Summary

Consider the task of factorising a matrix as a product of matrices with some fixed inner dimension . The model parameters are pairs of matrices with the appropriate dimensions, and the image of an input vector on the hidden layer is given by . To consider this vector in terms of hidden unit activations is to fix a co-ordinate system in the hidden feature space, and to measure the displacement of the vector along each co-ordinate axis. If denote the unit vectors corresponding to the chosen co-ordinate system, then the displacements are given by the inner products

We show below that if is any rotation of the hidden feature space, then the model parameters are just as likely as to result in the factorisation of a fixed matrix and that which of these occurs depends only on the random initialisation of gradient descent. Thus the hidden unit activations might just as likely have been given by

The hidden unit activations given by 1 and 2 can be very different indeed. In fact, since is an orthogonal transformation, we have

(see e.g. here). Thus the indeterminacy of the model parameters, i.e. vs. , might equivalently be thought of as an indeterminacy in the orientation of the co-ordinate system, i.e. the vs. the . The choice of orientation of co-ordinate basis is completely arbitrary, so speaking of hidden unit activations makes no sense at all.

The above holds more generally for an orthogonal transformation of the hidden feature space, i.e. for a composition of rotations and reflections.

Szegedy et al.

None of the above is new. For example, it was stated by Szegedy et al. in an empirical study of the interpretability of hidden units. We are demonstrating, step-by-step, a statement of theirs (which was about word2vec):

… word representations, where the various directions in the vector space representing the words are shown to give rise to a surprisingly rich semantic encoding of relations and analogies. At the same time, the vector representations are stable up to a rotation of the space, so the individual units of the vector representations are unlikely to contain semantic information.

Matrix factorisation and unit activation

Given a matrix and an inner dimension , the task of matrix factorisation is to learn two matrices and whose product approximates :

The parameter space consists of the entries of the matrices and . The hidden feature space, on the other hand, is the k-dimensional space containing the columns of and .

Error function

To train a matrix factorisation model using gradient descent, the model parameters are repeatedly updated using the gradient vector of the error function. An example error function could be

Notice that this choice of error function doesn’t depend directly on the pair of matrices , but rather only on their product , i.e. only on the approximation of . This is true of any error function , because error functions depend only on inputs and outputs.

Orthogonal transformations of the hidden feature space

Recall that orthogonal transformations of a space are just compositions of rotations and reflections about hyperplanes passing through the origin. Considered as matrices, orthogonal transformations are defined by the property that their product with their transpose gives the identity matrix. Using this property, it can be seen that an orthogonal transformation of the hidden feature space defines an orthogonal transformation of the parameter space by acting simultaneously on the column vectors of the matrices. If and denote the groups of orthogonal transformations on the hidden feature space and the parameter space, respectively, then:

Contour lines of the gradient

The effect of this block-diagonal orthogonal transformation on the parameter space corresponds to multiplying the matrices and on the left by the orthogonal transformation of the feature space, i.e. it effects . Notice that and yield the same approximation to the original matrix , since:

Thus , so the orthogonal transformations of the hidden feature space trace out contour lines of in the parameter space. Now the gradient vector is always perpendicular to the contour line, so the sequence of points in the parameter space visited during gradient descent preserve the orientation of the hidden feature space set at initialisation (see here, for example). So if gradient descent of starting at the initial parameters converges to the parameters , and you’d prefer that it instead converged to , then all you need to do is start the gradient descent over again, but this time with the initial parameters . We thus see that the matrices that our matrix factorisation model has learned are only determined up to an orthogonal transformation of the hidden feature space, i.e. up to a simultaneous transformation of their columns.

Gradient descent methods

The above statements continue to hold in the case of stochastic gradient descent, where the error function is not fixed but rather defined by varying mini-tasks (an instance being e.g. word2vec). Such error functions still don’t depend upon hidden layer values, so as above their gradient vectors are perpendicular to the contour lines traced out by the orthogonal transformations of the hidden layer. Thus the updates performed in stochastic gradient descent also preserve the original orientation of the feature space.

Initialisation

How likely is it that initial parameters, transformed via an orthogonal transformation as above, ever occur themselves as initial parameters? In order to conclude that the orientation of the co-ordinate system on the hidden layer is completely arbitrary, we need it to be precisely as likely. Thus if denotes the probability distribution on the parameter space from which the initial parameters are drawn, we require

for any initial parameters and any orthogonal transformation of the hidden feature space.

This is not the case with word2vec, where each parameter is drawn independently from a uniform distribution. However, it remains true that for any choice of initial parameters, there will still be any number of possible orientations of the co-ordinate system, but for some choices of initial parameters there is less freedom than for others.

Appendix: What about GloVe?

GloVe performs weighted matrix factorisation with bias terms, so the above should apply. The weighting is just a modified error function, and the bias terms are not hidden features and so are left unmodified by its orthogonal transformations. Like word2vec, GloVe initialises each parameter with independent samples from uniform distribution, so there are no new problems there. The real problem with applying the above analysis to GloVe is that the implementation of Adagrad used makes the learning regime dependent on the choice of basis of the hidden feature space (see e.g. here). This doesn’t mean that the hidden unit activations of GloVe make sense, it just means that GloVe is less amenable to theoretical arguments like those above and needs to be considered empirically e.g. in the manner of Szegedy et al.

[I often speak of such-and-such depending upon the choice of co-ordinate system, and proceed to show this by rotating the space. The following explains why this is equivalent (via the transpose)].

You awaken in a two-dimensional landscape. In front of you are co-ordinate axes, fixed to the ground on a pivot. The landscape is featureless except for a tree and a well. You get bored, and fall asleep again. When you awaken, you notice that the relative arrangement of the co-ordinate axes to the tree and the well is different. What happened?

You realise that you’ll never truly know what happened while you were asleep. Either (a) someone rotated the co-ordinate axes 90 degrees clockwise, or (b) someone rotated the world 90 degrees anti-clockwise about the pivot point of the axes.

Rotation of the space is equivalent (via the transpose) to rotation of the co-ordinate system. In fact, this is true more generally for orthogonal transformations and has a familiar mathematical expression. Let be an n-dimensional vector space with inner product and let be an orthonormal basis. If is an orthogonal transformation of , then for any point , we have

for all . That is, the co-ordinates of the transformed point with respect to the original basis are the co-ordinates of the original point with respect to the transpose-transformed basis.